Liar Game
PostPosted:Thu Aug 14, 2008 8:46 pm
This is one of the few manga I pick up that I actually enjoy instead of wondering why I'm still reading it. The basic premise is Nao Kanzaki got invited to the Liar Game, where you're in a zero-sum game that always has a goal that involves trying to take as much of your opponent money. Since the organization runs this is like the Mafia, that means the loser ends up owing A LOT of money to the organization. Nao is basically a Japanese version of a blonde, and managed to lose a million dollar in something like 5 minutes on the first round. After being told she'd have to probably sell her body for prostitution if she don't get that money back, she enlisted the help of Shinichi Akiyama, who is Light from DN in another parallel dimension where he decided to just lead a life of embezzlement and fraud and being locked up behind bars as opposed to playing God. Unsurprisingly Shinichi quickly gets Nao's money back due to his superhuman intelligence. For a 'thinking' manga, most of the plans devised by Shinichi make sense and are quite clever and actually can be reasonably guessed ahead of time without requiring superhuman intelligence of the reader.
But this is not what makes the series interesting. At about round 3 of the Liar Game, where the opposition obviously starts getting more devious, Nao, whose name basically means honest, comes to the conclusion that the goal of Liar Game is to find the most honest person in the world, which is she. As all the game are zero-sum, as long as an honest person won all the games, that person can simply return all the money to the losers (which is what she did) and then no one will have to be sold to China as slave labor. Yet all the while she still maintains an intellience level of slightly smarter than a rock. If Shinichi is the smarts of the series, then Nao is the charisma and the complete absence of intelligence.
As is revealed so far, the organization don't really care about smart people like Shinichi or any of the super smart guys they go up against. Smart people, according to the organization, can easily be manipulated by greed. On the other hand, Nao is too simple and honest to be tempted by these things, and she wouldn't be able to trick a rock even if she wanted to. Yet, and this is where I think the author is totally awesome, she manages to trick plenty of super smart guys because of her incredible charisma. It's sort of like Yuna at the end of FFX2 who says we need to destroy Vagnagun with the power of love (replace love with honesty in Nao's case), except when Nao does it, it is totally convincing.
There is no anime version of this, but I've heard there's a live-action version. Some of the earlier rounds are very simple to guess what will happen, though even when the schemes become more complicated they're never impossible to solve if you understand how the underyling game worked. This is a welcome change from the average thinking manga where the guy solving the problem not only is superhuman smart but generally possess knowledge that the reader does not even have.
But this is not what makes the series interesting. At about round 3 of the Liar Game, where the opposition obviously starts getting more devious, Nao, whose name basically means honest, comes to the conclusion that the goal of Liar Game is to find the most honest person in the world, which is she. As all the game are zero-sum, as long as an honest person won all the games, that person can simply return all the money to the losers (which is what she did) and then no one will have to be sold to China as slave labor. Yet all the while she still maintains an intellience level of slightly smarter than a rock. If Shinichi is the smarts of the series, then Nao is the charisma and the complete absence of intelligence.
As is revealed so far, the organization don't really care about smart people like Shinichi or any of the super smart guys they go up against. Smart people, according to the organization, can easily be manipulated by greed. On the other hand, Nao is too simple and honest to be tempted by these things, and she wouldn't be able to trick a rock even if she wanted to. Yet, and this is where I think the author is totally awesome, she manages to trick plenty of super smart guys because of her incredible charisma. It's sort of like Yuna at the end of FFX2 who says we need to destroy Vagnagun with the power of love (replace love with honesty in Nao's case), except when Nao does it, it is totally convincing.
There is no anime version of this, but I've heard there's a live-action version. Some of the earlier rounds are very simple to guess what will happen, though even when the schemes become more complicated they're never impossible to solve if you understand how the underyling game worked. This is a welcome change from the average thinking manga where the guy solving the problem not only is superhuman smart but generally possess knowledge that the reader does not even have.